Stamford reps decide how to end private meetings

Kate King

Published 10:41 pm, Tuesday, February 11, 2014

STAMFORD -- The Board of Representatives voted Monday night to end its leadership's longstanding practice of meeting with the mayor behind closed doors, opting instead to hold the monthly gatherings in public.

The board has been debating how to reform the private meetings since the November election. The meetings are a tradition that prior mayors going back decades have continued. Mayor David Martin pledged during his campaign to discontinue the gatherings, which participants have described as being purely bureaucratic.

The controversial process of reforming the meetings sparked hours of debate at the committee level, but on Monday only one city representative raised his hand to speak before the full 40-member board's final vote.

City Rep. Kieran Ryan, R-1, said the leadership's practice of meeting with the mayor needlessly duplicates the work of the Steering Committee. The Steering Committee acts as the board's gatekeeper for all the funding requests, ordinance proposals and department reviews that eventually make it onto the board's monthly agenda.

"Why that function needs to be replaced or augmented by a smaller, exclusive subset of the representatives is not clear to me," Ryan said.

There was no further public debate on the proposed rule change, although the two political parties spent more than two hours in private caucus before Monday's meeting. City Rep. Anabel Figueroa, D-8, said the Democratic Caucus discussed all of the board's proposed rule changes, and did not spend a disproportionate amount of time debating the leadership issue.

"We were talking about all the items that that particular committee had," she said.

Figueroa, who serves as one of the board's deputy majority leaders, was the only member of leadership to vote against the rule change. On Tuesday she said she actually supports the proposal and accidentally pressed the wrong button while voting Monday.

"I like it because it will be open to the public and open to everyone else who wants to come," Figueroa said. "It's not a secret meeting."

The proposal, which needed 21 votes to take effect, was approved with 25 representatives voting in favor, 10 against and two abstaining.

The rule change, proposed by President Randy Skigen, formally defines the Board of Representatives' leadership group and outlines the conditions under which its members can meet with the mayor. The eight-member leadership group includes the Board of Representatives' president, clerk, majority and minority leaders, deputy majority leaders and deputy minority leaders.

Under Skigen's proposal, the leadership's meetings with the mayor will be held in public and will be limited to discussions about the Board of Representatives' agenda items.

"There will be no votes. Anybody who wants to be there can be there," Skigen said in January. "There will be minutes. There will be a videotape recording. It will be as transparent as it can be."

Ryan and several other city representatives, however, asked why the mayor didn't just meet directly with the board's Steering Committee. Skigen said the mayor's participation in Steering Committee meetings, where votes are taken, would be an improper intrusion of the executive office into the legislative branch of city government.

"I'm comfortable with it," she said Tuesday. "It's going to be in a public forum, it's going to be recorded. It's going to be publicly noticed and people can attend."

It's not clear when the first public leadership meeting with the mayor will take place. A Steering Committee meeting was scheduled for Tuesday night, but the timing of Monday night's vote did not allow enough time for officials to publicly notice the meeting as outlined in the Freedom of Information Act. The next Steering Committee meeting will be in March.